The Beast from the Pit
by Dancingonthegreen
Summary: A creature crawls into a crack into the world to perform a dark, near forgotten ritual. Written as a prologue to a story I may continue.


In the hot forests of the mountain, thick trees broke away to a single spot. Birds neglected the area, and shadows consumed a valley that looked from the air like a crack in the earth itself. The valley was quite, and then something began in the darkness of the shadows. Drums.

Drums in the deep. The loud thrum that resonated from below, where hundreds dwelt in the shadowy depths of the cavern. This was it. A long, twisting stair case trailed down the cliff edge, winding around and around the walls of the pit in a never ending spiral that disappeared into the bottom. Each stair sloped some way or another with heavy scratch marks littering the roughly ground surface. The crags held strange beings, twisted and reptilian, clawed appendages dangling from their torsos haphazardly. Their slit-like eyes glowed in the dark, watching the robed figure who walked so carefully down into the near abyss that was the bottom of the stair way. It took each step carefully, looking down at its own clawed feet, ornately carved walking stick clicking just against rock and steadying it as it took another step, and another. And the drums played.

In utter black now, the being descended still, uninhibited by the disappearance of the light. The scaly beasts in the walls watched intently still, eyes showing and trailing with the slow moving creature.

The stairs ended, cutting off suddenly and molding with the cavern floor. Unlike the stairs, the floor was smooth, almost polished rock, that would glint with natural minerals had any light touched it. The cavern bottom was perfectly circular, wide enough for twenty men to stand shoulder to shoulder, and the walls sloped so that the entire cavern formed a rough cone. In the center of the circle protruded a table shape, a thirty foot wide circle that was dominated by a crater just as perfect in its cylindrical shape. The robed figure walked towards the object, walking stick clicking with each step. The inside of the crater was drenched in blood, pieces of bone and shattered scales floating in the filth. The pointed skull of a viper bobbed to the surface of the bloody pool before submerging once more.

"Come out," the figure said, its voice and old whisper, a pale imitation of what it was in youth. At command, four of the reptilians lining the walls appeared from small crevices near the bottom of the pit, dragging out two other humanoid figures with them. The two humanoids were tied by the hands with thorny, digging vines, and they showed severe discomfort from their already torn and bleeding wrists. The robed figure gestured to the pool of blood. "Lean them over." The reptilians did so brutally, shoving the humanoids over the stone edge, one so far that the humanoid's face splashed into the blood and they had to fight their way so not to drown in the mire.

The robed figure clattered over the lip of the pool, dropping its walking stick to the floor as it did so, and stood in the middle of the pool, dark blue robes quickly staining to dark maroon. From its side it removed a book bound in worn leather. It opened the book, looked almost fondly into the old, crinkled pages, and dropped it into the pool unceremoniously. Where the book landed, the pool bubbled and boiled hot for a second, and then only steam rose.

Turning its attention now to the humanoids, still bound and held by the malformed reptilians, the robed figure limped towards them, unbuckling its wide belt and tossing it aside. The belt struck the room's wall with a slap. Its robe, now flowing wide and loose, showed too big on its body. The figure next tossed that away with only more difficulty. The wet garments made a wet, smacking sound as they hit dry stone. The humanoids looked and gasped at the shriveled and decrepit form before them.

Covered head to toe in sleek, colorful skin, the figure was bestial. Both hands ended in inch long black claws, and its underarms and torso were covered in stretched, pale skin. Roughly female, though far from feminine, breasts mounded from its chest in the sickly sick, sagging and showing the monster's age.

Its head was worst. Round balls for eyes that protruded from its elongated face searched its audience. Slit shaped pupils darted between the two and its mouth, long and serpentine with four tiny nostrils only just above, opened to reveal a foot long pink tongue that stretched and forked. The tongue twitched in the air, rattling against itself in a hiss.

The serpent went forward, baring the claws of one hand and slashed across the face of the humanoid on its left. The humanoid screamed and fought its restraints, pulling its head back and another run of claws opened its exposed neck. This brought sudden resistance from the other humanoid as the first quickly bled out, flowing into the pool to add to the mire. The serpent turned, leaned down to examine the struggling being, sniffed and let loose its tongue to taste the air. Its tongue brushed the face of the…..

Elf. The flailing thing was a female Elf. Without a thought more, the serpent opened wide its maw, clamped down on the Elf's face, dragging her into the pool and gorging on hot meat, jaw extended wide to encompass as much of its prey as possible. Its fangs dug into soft flesh, injecting poison that burned the Elf's muscles, decaying them and forcing them to lock up on themselves. The Elf stopped struggling as the serpent fed.

In the blood of snakes and man, the serpent lay submerged, stomach fat, distended. As the old rites would have it, the creature was satisfied for only a moment.

The pool boiled. Rage and fire, burning into the serpent's veins, burst into its head, behind its eyes and it screamed and choked on its own bile. It thrashed, body threatening to vomit its meal as its head and consciousness split into a thousand solitary particles, deformed legs breaking apart in a hundred places.

The drumming stopped with a sudden silence that the world might have died and fallen into The Abyss.

And from the pool emerged a monster. The drumming began once more.


End file.
